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How to sell out your store in under 50 hours

We interviewed Marnie Ashe from Reload Digital. Reload Digital worked on Sunday Somewhere’s 5th birthday sale campaign which resulted in selling out of stock in under 50 hours. Here's how they did it.

Marnie spent 7 years in the Reload Brisbane office directing digital strategy and marketing for AUS based brands. London called, and she took the mantle of General Manager in the UK. From client communications and strategic marketing plans, to reporting and onboarding new clients, no day is the same.

Sunday Somewhere's Birthday Sale Success

Sunday Somewhere are well known to We Make Websites as we designed and developed their awesome website! Post launch, Marnie and the Reload team took on their digital marketing strategy, culminating in a 5th birthday party to remember. At five years old, Sunday Somewhere launched an incentivised sale campaign: everything $50 for fifty hours, which resulted in 95% of their stock being sold out after the 24-hour mark.

In just 24 hours, the campaign reached an impressive audience size of over 240,000 and received over 3,000 engagements on social media. Most importantly, all of this hype surrounding the campaign translated into direct results for Sunday Somewhere, with an impressive 11:1 ROI on the campaign.

What was key to the sales success and messaging?

“The mix of urgency, there was quite a lot of countdown before the campaign launched and a lot of messaging that really push customers to purchase. Sunday Somewhere played with the 5 concept, so 5th birthday, $50 for 50 hours and it was that nice repetition that really reaffirmed our messaging.

We saw an incredible spike as soon as the campaign launched at midnight on their 5th birthday. With the urgency and the limited availability, combined with such a good offer, customers were staying up late ready to jump on the site ready for when the offer went live.”

Is using a milestone, such as a birthday, a good idea for brands to build a digital campaign around?

“Anything that you can turn into a consumer friendly event is usually something you can then build a digital promotion campaign around. So milestones do work really nicely, but it doesn't have to be an anniversary milestone, you could use anything from new product launches, something fun, quirky and seasonal. It might be something to do with the summer, brand events, seasonal things in the calendar, anything you can create a story around is likely to be something you can then build a promotion around.”

Was it just hardcore fans camping out to get the midnight offer?

“Not just hardcore fans, people who had heard of the offer as well. There was a mix of existing customers and they actually acquired a good number of new customer orders, which was a key objective of the campaign.”

What was your strategy in terms of content for Sunday Somewhere’s social media channels?

“We approached Social from two angles. So from an organic social perspective, there was quite a bit of investment in terms of content and energy that was put into promoting that. Sunday Somewhere created a lot of content that surrounded the sale but not particularly focused on it, such as features and highlights of some of the glasses that would be on sale.

The second aspect was paid social advertising, which was primarily focused on new customer prospecting, so reaching customers who aren't followers of the brand but are likely to match their customer profile. We ran a range of different creatives. We had about 5/6 different creative assets that we used, all with different variations of the $50 for 50 hours campaign message. Through that, we were able to engage their existing followers, it was that two pronged angle that was successful when the sale went live.”

There are multiple paid search platforms when it comes to advertising your brand online, which key platforms did you predominantly invest in?

“Social advertising was a bit portion of the budget, as was search and shopping across the Google network. So that was critical to capture not just current customers of the brand, but avid sale shoppers as well. For example, Sunday Somewhere wouldn't particularly target the term "Sunglasses sale" however for this campaign we were able to broad the short term search phrases using paid advertising. We also used paid search to target keywords around their product range as well, such as the type of styles they offered. So we went quite a bit broader than what they would normally run, to be able to reach as many potential customers as possible.

The other key component of the campaign was display advertising, which we did through the google display network. With this we did both remarketing, so we built a few different audiences around that. So those who had been on the website during the sales period and then those that had been on the site before the promotion launched, those who had engaged with similar products in the past and we also did a new customer prospecting audience, so trying again to match demographic profile about who their customer is and reach those customers through the display network.”

How have you continued to work with Sunday Somewhere post the success of their birthday campaign?

The sale was Sunday Somewhere's first real exploration on a large scale into the paid advertising space, so since then there were able to take a lot of learnings from our campaigns to apply to their regular paid search strategy

We have continued with paid social advertising, especially prospecting through social advertising. predominantly what we work with them on is their paid search. Sunday Somewhere operate in a highly competitive market, which includes PPC competition from stockists who also sell their brand. They want to make sure they're in the number one position and at the top of search results when customers are looking for them.

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About the author

Sam is an e-commerce expert and brings her know-how to the We Make Websites blog on a regular basis. Focused on providing quality Shopify and e-commerce advice, some favourite topics include CRO, SEO and best practice content marketing techniques.